Reading Order
We Need New Names Reading Order
We Need New Names (2013) by NoViolet Bulawayo is the first novel by a Zimbabwean woman to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize — a two-part novel that follows Darling, a girl in the fictional Zimbabwean shantytown of Paradise, through her childhood games (stealing guavas from the wealthy suburb of Budapest, navigating the politics of a post-election political crisis) and then traces her journey to America, where she lives with her Aunt Fostalina in Michigan, tries to become American, and discovers what belonging and loss mean when the country you came from is in crisis and the country you are in does not want you. Bulawayo's prose is notable for its collective voice in the first section: Darling narrates as part of a group — 'we' rather than 'I' — and the novel's first half has the texture of childhood in community, the games and small violences and large sorrows of a group of children trying to make sense of a world that adults have made terrible. The American section shifts to a more conventional 'I' narration and a more conventional immigrant-novel structure, but Bulawayo gives it distinctiveness through Darling's unsentimental observation of American life — the obesity, the suburban blandness, the loneliness — from the perspective of someone who has seen real poverty and violence. The novel is a meditation on the pain of diaspora: the country you left is always present, always changing without you, and the country you are in can never fully receive you.
Where to start
We Need New Names — read the first section (Zimbabwe) and the second section (America) as two different modes; the collective 'we' of the childhood section and the individual 'I' of the American section are both deliberate formal choices.
Complete We Need New Names Book List
- 1Buy
We Need New Names
NoViolet Bulawayo·2013·The novel — Darling in Paradise township and then in Michigan; childhood games, political crisis, and the pain of diaspora. - 2Buy
Glory
NoViolet Bulawayo·2022·Bulawayo's second novel — a fictionalized account of Zimbabwe's 2017 military coup narrated through talking animals in the tradition of Animal Farm; the companion to We Need New Names in its engagement with Zimbabwean political crisis. - 3Buy
Nervous Conditions
Tsitsi Dangarembga·1988·Dangarembga's Zimbabwean feminist novel — the predecessor in Zimbabwean women's fiction; where Dangarembga writes about colonial education, Bulawayo writes about post-independence crisis. - 4Buy
Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie·2013·Adichie's Nigerian-American novel — published the same year as We Need New Names; the companion in African diaspora fiction examining what America looks like from the outside. - 5Buy
Homegoing
Yaa Gyasi·2016·Gyasi's Ghanaian-American multigenerational novel — the companion in African-American diaspora fiction; a historical perspective on the same Atlantic world Darling navigates in the present. - 6Buy
The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini·2003·Hosseini's Afghan-American novel — the cross-cultural companion in diaspora fiction; the experience of leaving a country in crisis and navigating American life from the outside. - 7Buy
A Grain of Wheat
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o·1967·Ngũgĩ's Kenyan independence novel — the East African literary tradition that We Need New Names belongs to; the earlier account of the political crisis that created the conditions for Darling's Zimbabwe. - 8Buy
The Famished Road
Ben Okri·1991·Okri's Nigerian magical realist novel — the African literary companion in its account of a child navigating a world that adults have made terrible; the spirit world of the child's perspective.
We Need New Names — Frequently Asked Questions
What is We Need New Names about?
We Need New Names is told in two parts. The first part follows Darling, a girl of about ten, in Paradise — a fictional Zimbabwe shantytown named with bitter irony. The children play games: hunting for guavas in the wealthy suburb called Budapest, playing 'Find Bin Laden,' visiting the church where a pregnant girl has hanged herself. The background is the political and economic crisis of Mugabe-era Zimbabwe — the hyperinflation, the election violence, the destruction of the middle class. The second part follows Darling in Michigan, where she has gone to live with her Aunt Fostalina. She goes to high school, freezes in the Michigan winter, watches American television, and tries to become American while Zimbabwe continues to fall apart without her. She talks on the phone with her friends back home; the conversations become more desperate and more strange as the crisis deepens.
What is the significance of the collective 'we' narration in the first section?
The first section of We Need New Names is narrated in the first-person plural — Darling says 'we' rather than 'I,' referring to herself and her group of friends (Bastard, Chipo, Godknows, Sbho, Stina). This collective narration is unusual in literary fiction and is one of the novel's most distinctive formal choices. It represents the communal nature of childhood in the shantytown — the children exist as a group, their identities not yet fully individuated — and it also represents the collective nature of the crisis: the poverty and political violence are not individual experiences but communal ones, shared by the entire community. When Darling leaves for America, the narration shifts to 'I' — she has been individuated by the diaspora experience, separated from the community that defined her, and the formal shift marks this change.
How does the novel portray Zimbabwe's political crisis?
Bulawayo does not name Zimbabwe or Robert Mugabe explicitly — the country is unnamed in the novel, though clearly Zimbabwe, and the president is referred to only as 'the President.' This fictional distance allows Bulawayo to engage with the political crisis without writing journalism, but the references are specific enough that Zimbabwean readers (and readers with some knowledge of the period) will recognize the hyperinflation, the election violence, the farm seizures, the Operation Murambatsvina (the 2005 destruction of urban informal settlements), and the MDC-ZANU-PF conflict. Bulawayo is writing about a crisis that was ongoing when she was writing the novel (she left Zimbabwe for the US in 2000 and was living in Michigan while writing it), and the novel has the quality of testimony — not journalism but something closer to grief.
What does the novel say about diaspora and belonging?
We Need New Names is fundamentally about the pain of diaspora: the impossibility of fully belonging to either the country you left or the country you went to. Darling in America is not fully American — she is noticed for her accent, her difference, her Africanness — but she is also increasingly not fully Zimbabwean: when she talks to her friends back home, their experiences are diverging; the crisis is happening without her, and she has not been there to experience it. The title — 'we need new names' — comes from a line in the novel about Zimbabweans who take American names to fit in, but it also suggests the deeper need: to find new ways of naming the experience of being between worlds, belonging fully to neither.
What should I read after We Need New Names?
After We Need New Names, Bulawayo's second novel Glory (2022) — a fictionalized account of Zimbabwe's 2017 military coup — is the natural follow-up. Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (1988) is the essential Zimbabwean women's fiction predecessor. For the African diaspora novel, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah (2013) and Teju Cole's Open City (2011) are important companions. For the childhood-in-crisis tradition, Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss (2006) and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (2000) are cross-cultural comparisons.
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